


ultraviolence

by clytemnestras



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, F/M, Moral Ambiguity, Natasha Romanov Backstory, Oral Sex, one of my best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 08:46:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7567720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She walked into the embassy dressed as a girl and she left a Widow</p>
            </blockquote>





	ultraviolence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tenshinrtaiga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenshinrtaiga/gifts).



> for the [morbid and spooky](http://scorpiod1.livejournal.com/108115.html) dark!ficathon
> 
> insp: _please know that if you feel the hair rise on the back_  
>  _of your neck, sense a shadow in the bathroom_  
>  _mirror, find eyes in the thick of night, I am here._
> 
> ...then Bucky arrived and refused to leave.

She looks sometimes at the remnants of dead things she kept, salvaged from crime scenes and keeping her human the more shadowed she threatened to become. Everything is small when it matters - a baby’s fist curling around it’s mother's fingers, the infinitely distant view of stars, a young girl's heart pulled out at eight years old and jarred so she may grow up and hold it in her hands, ready to smash.

 

Correction: she looks sometimes at her hands and sees the world in them, all of it screaming.

 

*

 

(What you don't know is that in the end, in  the secluded underbelly, Russia is a small place.

 

It hardly feels she was ever young, but she remembers home being grey with war wounds and lined with a practised hush. Ears on the corner of every building. She remembers being one of them.

 

She was fifteen when they sent her out alone for the first time, looking younger, her  savage fox-self bundled into satin with nothing but the poison vial in her gloves for comfort.

 

She walked into the embassy dressed as a girl and she left a Widow, dignitaries falling to her pointed toes as snared flies or dead ones.

 

The Soldier picked her up from the back door, having her hold his cold arm so he could grab his gun with the other. 

 

He slid her into the back of the car, not smiling but unfocused enough to be gentle. He did not call her Widow. He called her  _ Lisichka. _ )

 

*

 

Steve catches her by the waist and flings her upward so she can twist in transit, catch the air under her feather of a body and do the job of the sun. She fires down towards the earth, counting the shots like nursery rhyme. 

 

(These bullets are tranquillisers, and even the gun feels different under her hand, lighter, hollow, false. There is an unreality to the job, and she hates it. A good girl is a hollow girl, is a false girl.

 

At least, she thinks, they still bloom red.)

 

Steve catches her easily and swerves her under his shield in the retaliation. There is an irony in her sewn straight mouth and the weight of his eyes and hands on her shoulders. 

 

“Got your back,” he says, not quite smiling, and she wants to draw blood.

 

“Back at you,” she says, changing her clip.

 

Her gun is a toy, childish, soulless thing. She points it at him for a wild second, knowing the serum would keep it from doing much but still thinking about the terrifying feeling, firing until he stops moving, until there is nothing red left inside to pump through. One second, then shifted in another, she raises above the enclave of his body and shield and firing until she hears bodies fall.

 

*

 

In spite of reformation, they are not above sending her on the filthy missions. 

 

She works in the quiet, beneath the masquerade. She is the lone two eyes on the burning house, blood money going down with it despite Hill's protests in her earpiece.

 

Her fingers are so washed with clean they feel bloody and she watches the farmhouse burn, bodies like charred meat. It hits her just like hunger.

 

The next time, Fury sends her into the pit, into the  _ bed _ . 

 

These men who sink their teeth into small girls and drag them from their homelands, open and pliant things, traded easily as arms. She lies down and lets one drag his cracked mouth along her ribs and up, her long throat and jaw traced by a tongue that licks into her mouth, tasting sugar and salt and a burning that sinks through to his very guts.

 

She almost thanks Fury for letting her watch the bastard die. She informs him whilst cleaning her knives, after the rest of the ring spat their last rattling breaths around the metal that he will never punish her in that way again.

 

*

 

(They would keep her any way they cared and unthinking, she would thank them.

 

Her clothes always fit perfectly and her smiles were always rewarded with those gorgeous screams and she was the  _ best  _ at what she did, at pushing switchblades between gold-adorned knuckles until the mark sobbed out his secrets into the skin of her throat.

 

She slept with Bolshoi dancers pirouetting behind her eyes, her own hands at home against her leotard and finding the concealed darts. She dreamt killing the Queen of England and sat up laughing.

 

Ivan watched her walk on pointed toes with a smile, knowing what she yearned for made her silent. 

 

Even The Soldier would not hear her creep up beside him and press a gun to his throat.)

 

*

 

There are stories that she remembers quietly in the back of her mind, of a fox and her brother the wolf. 

 

Sister Fox as a cunning but vicious thing, she burnt bridges with those who loved her by stealing too much of theirs. When a dog snapped and turned on her, sank his teeth into her tail and ripped her open, she did not weep.

 

When the rabbits made fun of her she tricked them, gathered five and tied their tails together. As they all ran in warring directions their tails lopped clean off, and she kept them for herself.

 

She glances around the tower often enough, sees all these people so assured of their cause, if not their pasts, and will the future better.

 

Clint is a tactile partner, though, will drag her from dizzying fantasy with one touch of his calloused hands, and she knows he is atoning as much as she. That their futures are bound in dangerous ways.

 

Clint will drop his head onto her shoulder and whisper, “You and me, kid. No matter, no cause, no shit.”

 

She will bristle or relax depending on the day, herself exposed and waiting for her new tail.

 

*

 

(The Soldier was the first of her own.

 

He hoisted her up onto his shoulders as they fought, as she struck her claws into his neck and he laughed there, the delicate skin of her thighs quivering beneath it.

 

Her fingers sank into his hair and he bit down roughly on her left thigh, making the path with his warm tongue to where she was only familiar by the touch of her own fingers (and medics, and when her body is numb and plastic and her name is not Natalia.)

 

He drove them back until she slammed against the wall, the impact ringing hard through to her bones.

 

He devoured and she held him there until his lungs swelled to bursting, until he was begging for some glancing touch from her, and shes told him to keep going, tickling her pointed nails along the ridges of his spine. Her insides filled and filled and filled with him, some uncontrollable force that made her body betray her, silver cast-muscles shaking with the force.

 

She didn't make a sound, not one, as she presseed her fingers into his jaw to force his mouth open, but made sure he keened when her nails drew blood. 

 

“Beg me, James,” she said, thighs tightening.

 

His cold hand never warmes where it held her up, and she was glad for it.)

 

*

 

She looks Steve in the eye when she realises who he’s hunting for - Barnes, James - and she smiles. 

 

She says, “We’ll find him. I promise,” laying her small hands atop his, all the world's weight pressed there. His eyes go hazy with it, implausible hope as a side effect of devotion. Already, before they even start, he is broken.

 

His hands are warm under hers as before, good American blood rushing double time. 

 

She thinks twin hazy but clear eyes met across the battlefield and quelled like flushed cheeks and returned memory; two sets of big, rough hands gripping muscle and finding home.

 

It strikes her mean at the wrong moment and she buries her laughter down into steel guts. She is the world, and the world is unkind.

 

*

 

She remembers waking the first night with all the teeth in her head chattering, adrenaline filtering through blood like a poison. It was easy to crawl out of her room and ease off the cuffs, to move through the dark soundlessly once she found the slice of light between their rooms.

 

She sat right there on Clint's chest, knife barely a weight on his throat, digging as he breathed and blinked away sleep.

 

One slash, easy as that - she feels the memory warp in her mind. Could have been one quick splash of blood and the quiet slowing of his heart, splutters muffled by the calm press of her hand over his mouth. Her stripped down and burning clothes, the sound of the shower.

  
She could wash herself clean again, like it's nothing.


End file.
